Memorial to the Future
January 19 - 23, 2022 at LA ART SHOW
Memorial to the Future, 2022
A collaborative installation concerning Climate Change
Installation Sculpture by Daniela Soberman
Video selections by Wilfried Agricola de Cologne and Kisito Assangni
Open sourced photo selections by Sue-Na Gay, Torrance Art Museum
Home construction materials, plaster, open-source photographs, video monitors.
Approx. 33 x 33 x 20 feet
Curated by Max Presneill, Torrance Art Museum
The Utopianism of Modernity that led to scientific and technological developments since the Industrial Revolution also led us towards forms of capitalist excess that have come to endanger the planet and the life forms upon it. Exploitation, over-consumption and greed have driven this while an ostrich-head-in-the-sand has characterized our approach to engaging with climate change, as well as the problems and potential solutions that await us in the present as much as the near future.
The formalist structure created by Daniela Soberman acts as the historical link to the project of Modernity and its aspirations while simultaneously reminding us of its perils and failures. Using Brutalist architecture as a reference point that encapsulates both the idealism and real-world, abject failure of this model, the collaborations (via the video selections and the open-sourced documentary photographs) highlight the need for immediate action. They do this not by way of propaganda, but rather via a diversity of imagery and concerns that by physical proximity in the installation bring together various warnings of danger in respect of our environment, nature and climate.
References to various historical artists are transparent and this project also engages with concepts such as the ‘white cube’ of the institutional or gallery space, in a self-reflective critique of our own complicity.
"While making the structure, the work very quickly became a marriage between content and process. The actual act of making it outdoors – one individual, outside in the elements, exposed to massive climate extremes including months of searing heat coupled with hurricane-strength winds and then days of torrential rain – mirrored similar challenges happening all across the globe.
It was built to create a metaphor and a spectacle. It was built to remind us what we face and what we as humans must do. Answers and solutions to pressing global issues can come from us all.” Daniela Soberman
About Daniela Soberman:
Soberman is a first generation American and daughter to immigrant parents from the former Yugoslavia. She grew up making regular visits to Eastern Europe where brutalism and socialist avant-garde became foundational to her DNA and now regularly shows up in her work. Soberman explores themes of un-conventionalism, memory, and shared human experiences.
ECOPOETICS OF GENERIC WORLD
Video selection by Kisito Assangni
Featured Video Artists:
Peter Brandt (Denmark)
Kent Anderson Butler (USA)
Badr El Hammami (Morocco)
Piyali Ghosh (India)
Enoh Liennemann (Nigeria/Germany)
Txema Novelo (Mexico)
Stéphanie Pommeret (France)
Angelina Voskopoulou (Greece)
Gernot Wieland (Austria)
Amina Zoubir (Algeria)
Climate change is arguably the most pressing socio-political issue of our time, with famine, poverty, loss of bio-diversity, and mass-relocation hanging in the balance. Nowadays, politically responsible contemporary art needs to explicitly take account of ecological issues.
ECOPOETICS OF GENERIC WORLD offers a range of artistic positions and responses to the dichotomy of impending climate change. In his 1967 seminal article The Roots of Our Ecological Crisis, historian Lynn White argues that what people do about their ecology depends on what they think about themselves in relation to things around them. Climate change is a man-made problem and deserves the attention of the masses. Why do many people say they care about the environment but then do nothing about it? To answer this question, we must understand how humans think and act as groups, our socially and culturally mediated ways of interacting with each other, other species, and the world around us.
ECOPOETICS OF GENERIC WORLD wants to look at climate change like a syndrome with different factors that tap into something larger, because not every artist is approaching it from the same angle. The project consists of a screening that presents works by international contemporary artists working in the intersection of arts, climate change, culture and technology. Most film and video works offer a variety of opinions and outlooks. Through this program, the selected artists demonstrate the capacity to shape climate communications and create metaphors that could serves as curatorial advisor to Latrobe Regional Gallery in Morwell - Victoria, Australia.
Memory of The Future?
Video selection by Wilfried Agricola de Cologne
Featured Video Artists:
Tova Beck-Friedman (USA)
Laura & Sira Cabrera Diaz (Spain)
Wilfried Agricola de Cologne (Germany)
Renata Padovan (Brazil)
Ian Gibbins (Australia)
Mikey Peterson (USA)
Claude Ciccolella (France)
Ebba Jahn (Germany)
Oliver Ressler (Austria)
Elena Vertikova (Poland)
Abdoul-Ganiou Dermani (Togo)
Susanne Wiegner (Germany)
Kim Maree (New Zealand)
Susanne Layla Petersen (Denmark)
Jean-Michel Rolland (France)
The concept of the project’s composition of art videos curated by Wilfried Agricola de Cologne is in considering the architectural installation at Torrance Art Museum as a modular system and his curatorial contribution as one module among the others forming in its totality, on one hand a curatorial artwork (among other artworks in the framework of the global artwork, the installation on its totality is representing), communicating with the other static, interactive or moving installation components.
When the viewer/visitor is sensually experiencing the installation, particularly the moving images modules, the 100 minutes running program of “Memory of the Future?” is confronting the visitor with the memory of the Unknown, Unexpected, the yet-to-come, as long as he/she is sensually experiencing the installation.
“Memory of the Future” is referring beyond that primarily to the Uncertainty of the Future of Planet Earth and its inhabitants - the “Climate Change” they are causing. How do artists deal with the aspect of taking responsibility for each other, by taking responsibility for Planet Earth, saving its integrity for future generations?
The selected artists originate from different continents and cultural backgrounds & experiences and approach the aspect of transferring the memory of the already-existing to the not-yet-existing differently. The 15 selected video works, communicating with each other and the other art modules they are embedded with, are sharing the memory of ideas and ideals, juxtaposing the incompatibility of economic and ecological interests.
As a cultural activist, new media artist und curator, Wilfried Agricola de Cologne (Germany) is also the Director and founder of The New Museum of Networked Art and its associated platforms of static, interactive and moving images, including a huge collection of art videos created by international artists between 2000 and 2020. Since 2000, his artistic and curatorial works have been presented on a wide range of festivals and media art exhibitions all over the world including, Venice Biennale, Biennale de Montreal, Biennale of New Media and Video Santiago de Chile, Biennale of Electronic Media Perth, FILE Electronic Language Festival Sao Paulo.
Memorial to the Future was originally conceived by collaborative conversations between Daniela Soberman and TAM Curator Max Presneill as a site specific, architectural installation for DIVERSEartsLA 2022 (curated by Marisa Caicholo), at the LA Art Show.